Tonight, in San Antonio, Dylan Harper will try to keep his season alive. The Spurs are down 3-1 to the Knicks in the NBA Finals, facing elimination, and the No. 2 pick out of Rutgers has looked nothing short of spectacular — 21 points on 8-of-12 shooting in Game 4, a plus-12 night sharing a floor with Victor Wembanyama. Seeing how talented and dominant this team can be earlier on in games, I am confidently saying these Spurs will be the second team in NBA history to complete the infamous 3-1 comeback
(Lebron James’ 2016 Cavaliers 1st). Despite my thoughts and whatever happens over the next 48 minutes, the kid has definitely exceeded expectations so far.
Which makes what’s happening back on the banks of the Raritan a little harder to digest.
A pipeline uncorrelated to wins
Here’s the uncomfortable part. Harper played one season at Rutgers. So did Ace Bailey, the other lottery pick off that 2024-25 roster. Two top-10 NBA draft picks, on the same team, in the same season — and the Scarlet Knights went 15-17 and missed the tournament. Then both left for the league, and this past season Rutgers fell to 14-20, 6-14 in the Big Ten, dead last but one at 14th place. The offense ranked 294th in the country out of 365 teams, scoring just 70.5 points a game.
Take a minute to understand that. Steve Pikiell’s program can attract and showcase NBA-caliber talent as Harper is proof, in real time, on the biggest stage the sport has. Yet, the program still can’t turn that talent into March. The pipeline works. The team doesn’t. And to me, now it is the only thing keeping the lights on a story that’s mostly about money.
The $516 million hole
Rutgers athletics program is bleeding, and it’s not close.
According to NJ Advance Media’s Keith Sargeant, the department ran a $78 million deficit for the 2024-25 fiscal year once you strip out the subsidies propping it up. This consists of $7 million from the university’s general budget, $8 million from the state, and $15.8 million in student fees. Total spend that year: $193.8 million! And the running tab since Rutgers joined the Big Ten in 2014-15 now sits at $516.9 million in cumulative deficits.
The Big Ten was supposed to be the answer. Conference membership pays as Rutgers collected roughly $61.5 million in league distributions, an amount a program in the Big East could only dream about. However, that check, as large as it is, is getting run through. First-year athletic director Keli Zinn expects 2025-26 spending to clear $200 million and has called it the worst profit-and-loss year in department history.
Why this year specifically? Because the bill for a new era just came due.
The settlement changes everything
In June 2025, the House v. NCAA settlement ended college sports’ amateur model for good. Starting from 2025-26, schools can pay their athletes directly, capped at $20.5 million a year and that figure climbs toward roughly $33 million per school by the mid-2030s. For Rutgers, that $20.5 million lands on the books for the very first time this year, an entirely new line item stacked on top of an operation already losing tens of millions annually.
What this really means: Rutgers used to compete for players using scholarships and a conference brand. Now it competes with a salary. Essentially, every dollar it writes to athletes is a dollar that wasn’t in the budget a year ago, at a program that was already in the red. The cap is a ceiling. In practice, the schools with billionaire boosters treat it like a floor and find the loopholes; the ones without that firepower, like Rutgers, feel it as a hard new cost.
That’s the pickle. Football still eats the lion’s share of any revenue-sharing pool, as it does almost everywhere, which leaves men’s basketball fighting for scraps of a budget that’s underwater to begin with, and fighting it in a Big Ten where the spending race never slows.
Where the economy walks in the door
This is where the broader money picture stops being abstract.
The traditional backstops for a deficit like Rutgers’ are donors, student fees, and institutional support. All three are under pressure at once. Across college sports, the wealthy donors who bankrolled the first wave of NIL collectives are pulling back at a record pace; the returns on those “investments” were always a letdown, and now those same donors are being asked to also fund revenue sharing and ballooning roster costs. When markets are choppy and giving capacity tightens, the booster checks that used to plug holes get smaller and rarer. For a public university in New Jersey, leaning harder on state dollars or student fees is politically radioactive, especially while the football team finishes 5-7 and basketball finishes 14-20.
So schools are doing what cash operations with valuable assets always eventually do: They are relying on Wall Street.
Utah finalized the first private-equity deal in college athletics, a partnership with New York firm Otro Capital expected to generate around $500 million, with the firm taking a minority stake in a new for-profit entity that runs ticketing, sponsorships, and media. The Big 12 is exploring league-wide structures. The logic is cold but simple: revenue keeps rising, costs rise faster, donors are tapped out, and private capital has the cash and the cost-cutting instincts that athletic directors don’t. There’s a federal overlay too where an April 2026 executive order injected regulatory uncertainty into NIL and revenue-sharing structures, the kind of ambiguity that makes any investor demand a greater margin of safety.
The bet
Here’s the bind, stated plainly. To climb out of a $500 million hole, Rutgers basketball has to start winning, because winning is what fills Jersey Mike’s Arena, sells the conference broadcasts, and gives boosters a reason to keep writing checks(Supply and Demand 101). Yet, winning now costs more than ever, in a revenue-sharing market where Rutgers is structurally outperformed by programs with deeper pockets and looser donors.
Do I think Rutgers will eventually sign a PE deal? Yes simply due to the fact of their deficit and need for cash. Could we see alumni being frustrated down the road due to several monetizations from an outside investor? Perhaps. However, just like any controversial decision, we will just have to wait for it to play out.
As for the NBA finals, Dylan Harper and his team will win tonight and successfully overcome the knicks for a championship. The program that put him on the map is still figuring out how to afford the next one, and whether in this economy, it can even keep trying at all.
